National

As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Published: January 11, 2002

For most of his career, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose was best known for his exhaustive multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He was respected in his field but seldom read by the general public until 1994, when he published "D-Day," a sentimental tale about rank-and-file soldiers.

"D-Day" became a best seller and changed Mr. Ambrose's life. To manage his soaring income, Mr. Ambrose incorporated into what is now called Ambrose & Ambrose Inc., based in Helena, Mont. He began to keep his five grown children busy as research assistants and published best sellers roughly every two years. With his family's help, he became the most prolific, the most commercially successful and the most academically accomplished of a new group of blockbuster historians.

Lately, however, some historians have begun to wonder about the toll of his prodigious pace. On Saturday, he acknowledged that his current best seller, "The Wild Blue," inappropriately borrowed the words and phrases of three passages from a book by the historian Thomas Childers, "The Wings of Morning." A closer examination of "The Wild Blue" by The New York Times indicates that in at least five other places Mr. Ambrose borrowed words, phrases and passages from other historians' books. Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions.

But even while conceding mistakes, Mr. Ambrose also defended his overall methods. He noted that in each case he included a footnote to the works he used, and he sometimes praised the books in his text.

"I tell stories," Mr. Ambrose said. "I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation."

"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't," Mr. Ambrose said. "I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I went to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from."

In general, professional historians consider it a failing to rely so closely on a single work by another historian for whole passages in any event, even when attributed. More important, Mr. Ambrose should have marked direct quotations in the text, or at the very least noted the closeness of his paraphrase in his footnotes, historians say. College students caught employing the same practices would be in trouble.

Mr. Ambrose initially defied his critics to find other borrowed sentences without quotation marks in his 30 books, before he was shown the passages from two readily available previous works that he used in "The Wild Blue." He acknowledged using sentences verbatim and in at least five cases closely echoed the language and structure of longer passages from both the Army's official seven-volume study, "The Army Air Forces in World War II" by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (University of Chicago, 1949) and "The Rise of American Air Power" by Michael S. Sherry (Yale University Press, 1987).

Although Mr. Ambrose, 66, said his integrity had never wavered, he acknowledged that his methods changed over time, as he turned to more popular subjects and relied more on his children.

When Mr. Ambrose earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1960, he said, his ambition was to emulate traditional historians. His first book, "Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff," was dense with footnotes and scholarly minutiae and read by almost no one. But one of its admirers was Eisenhower, who in 1964 tapped Ambrose, then 28, to write his biography.

Mr. Ambrose deliberately overcame his own admiration for Eisenhower to write a nuanced two-volume biography including Eisenhower's failures. His three-volume biography of Nixon underscored the former president's virtues.

"With Nixon and Eisenhower I was just wedded to the documents," Mr. Ambrose said. "It was a total marriage."

Mr. Ambrose's scholarship helped him win tenure at the University of New Orleans and in 1983 to secure financing for its Eisenhower Center, where he worked with a team of researchers to collect the recollections of more than 2,000 veterans.

Mr. Ambrose's interest had turned to stories of triumphant heroes with few moral or historical ambiguities, like those profiled in "Band of Brothers," published in 1993.

After the success of "D-Day" a year later, his editors at Simon & Schuster began to look forward more eagerly to each next book.

"We welcome the fact that he is prolific," said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster, "He works at a schedule that he sets, and we encourage the amount of his output because there is a readership that wants it."

For his part, though, Mr. Ambrose said he never felt pushed. His editor, Alice Mayhew, had even advised him to slow down, telling him, "I don't want people to think of you as somebody just pumping out cookies," as he recalled last week.